


send me all your vampires (and I can't get enough)

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon Compliant, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, Happy Ending, Healers, Holding Hands, M/M, Minor Injuries, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Touching, True Love, standard warnings for non-specific references to winter soldier brainwashing etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-14 00:55:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4543983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America had warrior blood, and the Winter Soldier was a magician, and they healed each other.</p>
<p>Or: “You said you wanted to know if you still could,” Steve said, “if you could still heal someone. You can. You <i>did.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	send me all your vampires (and I can't get enough)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OhCaptainMyCaptain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhCaptainMyCaptain/gifts), [hitlikehammers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/gifts), [shanology](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanology/gifts), [ninemoons42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/gifts), [Feanor_in_leather_pants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feanor_in_leather_pants/gifts), [boopboop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boopboop/gifts), [Kellyscams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kellyscams/gifts), [coldhope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/gifts).



> Oops, never put this up here! Shall do it now before leaving for Paris (so I might not reply to comments quickly, but I'll see them!). 
> 
> Written, or ninety percent written, on a plane while listening to Third Eye Blind’s “I Want You,” hence the title. Originally posted as a gift for some of my favorite Stucky people, [over on tumblr](http://luninosity.tumblr.com/post/125462568889/random-fic-dedicated-to-just-a-few-of-my-favorite).
> 
> **Semi-AU in which everything is canon-compliant but magic and magicians also exist, and some bits of folklore are real. Minor spoilers for the Ant-Man end credits scene, though it doesn’t really matter; Steve might just find Bucky there anyway.**

Captain America had warrior blood, and the Winter Soldier was a magician, and they healed each other.

That was the fairytale version, of course. The truth was, like most truths, more absurd and more heartbreaking and more full of love.

Steve had known about himself for years, had known since his mother’d murmured soft lilting words about Cu Chulainn and Lugh of the Long Hand and the strength of the old kings and their Irish hill-forts and mounds. Only a drop or two, she’d told him, just a whisper of bloodline, but you have that strength, Steven Rogers. You always will.

Mythological figures in one’s bloodline sounded well and good, but in daily life meant less than the ability to breathe without wheezing, Steve discovered. Anyway it was a bit embarrassing: most families had a weatherworker or fortune-teller on some branch of the tree, and nearly everyone knew someone who could promise a spell for the right price, but magic as a whole was dying out and kind of ridiculous and Old-World superstitious, not part of the glittering new twentieth century, full of zippy automobiles and guns and skyscrapers and antibiotics. Steve looked at his scrawny body in the mirror, and thought again about great warriors, and shrugged thin adolescent shoulders; but he held on to the memory of his mother’s voice in private, in quiet moments, as a certainty.

He met Bucky Barnes—really properly met Bucky Barnes, not just the usual byways of schoolyard gossip and circulating names—one clumsy pre-teen after-school autumn day, in the afternoon, when the air tasted sharp and dry as woodsmoke and tingled with the crunch of russet leaves.

He fell in love with Bucky Barnes, blindingly brilliantly so, that same day. Bucky said later that he’d had Steve beat, if only by a matter of minutes, the minutes in which he’d come round a corner and found a ferociously beautiful blond pixie facing down three large muscle-towers. Steve sighed and kissed him every time he told that story, so he’d stop talking, which only meant that Bucky told that story more.

Nothing Steve did, none of Steve’s warrior blood, could save Bucky, of course. Not even when Bucky’d healed him, healed his broken nose in fact, the first time they met.

Steve Rogers fell in love with Bucky Barnes, and Bucky Barnes went to war, and Steve Rogers turned himself into Captain America and looked in a mirror at his new muscles and thought about fighting bullies, and Steve found Bucky and fought beside Bucky and lost Bucky and wanted to die.

He thought maybe he did die, for a while. It felt like being alone.

He woke up from death the second he saw pale blue eyes and long dark hair and heard Bucky’s voice, and color exploded back into his world: as if Bucky, who’d always healed him with a touch, had by his mere presence brought back Steve’s heart.

Bucky fought him and then saved him and then left him alone on the banks of the Potomac. Steve tried to find him; got interrupted by a few apocalypses and stopped to save the world. Bucky would understand, he thought, Bucky would—Bucky always _had_. Understood.

Steve tracked him and Steve’s friends tracked him and Bucky let them find him at last, and Steve understood that too. Bucky crouched on the floor of the dirty factory, arm pinned in a vise—arm pinned as if he’d tried to contain himself, as if he’d wanted to be unable to harm anyone, and Steve knew that he’d not expected anyone to come.

Steve had come. Bucky recognized him. Steve knew he did.

All of this went through Steve’s heart like an arrow, as he gazed at the man he loved and forgot once more how to breathe. Bucky, crumpled into shadows in the dying rust-metal of the abandoned space, gazed back through tangled long hair. His arm gleamed silver and dark: oil, bruises, scratches and scores across a red star like he’d been trying unspeakable things with the machines beside him, with cruelly tearing metal jaws.

Steve, pinned in place by the sight, remembered everything, remembered that first day of the rest of his life, remembered Bucky’s warm hand on his face. Wanted to scream; felt the scream trapped behind his mouth the way it would be in a dream.

“Help me,” Bucky whispered.

Those were the last words Bucky spoke for eight days. Steve counted. Steve bit through his own lip rather than cry.

They went back to New York. They went to the Tower; it was the safest place, even now, and Tony Stark regarded the Winter Soldier with a kind of bitter hard-fought compassion, with an expression that said _you killed my parents and I know it wasn’t you making that choice but my heart also knows your finger pulled that trigger,_ and gave them an entire floor, one very far away from Tony’s own, and sumptuous.

Bucky remained voiceless. Alert, watching. Taking in information. Permitting Tony’s inquisitive hands on his arm. But unspeaking. Venturing nothing. And Steve could not ask, not when Bucky was being so brave, so trusting, following him into the heart of the Avengers stronghold and into a shower and into new soft pajama pants, all without argument.

The morning of the ninth day, Bucky produced, “Steve,” out of thread-thin air, and Steve shattered a coffee-mug with one astounded convulsive twitch of hand and heart.

Bucky went silent again, gazing down at their sleek smooth breakfast table. The air hovered, cool and autumn-clear again and breakable as glass.

“Bucky,” Steve said. “Bucky, yes, I’m, that’s, yes I’m Steve, oh God, yes please.”

Bucky said nothing. Steve’s blood fell to the floor, along with his heart and the broken shards of coffee-stained cup. The cuts were not bad, at least the ones on his fingers, the physical ones.

Bucky carried on saying nothing, but stood up. His gaze landed someplace around Steve’s bare toes. Steve’s mouth pleaded, _Bucky_.

Bucky came over, got a small worried crease between eyebrows the way he once had. Took Steve’s wounded hand, touched Steve’s palm. Warmth spread outward from the touch: flowing, pulsing, pooling along nicks and scrapes, soothing pain. New skin began to bloom, clean and protected. Bucky’s eyes were intent; Bucky bit a lip, focusing.

“You,” Steve said, and stopped as words tangled in his throat, raw and shaky.

Bucky lifted the hand away.

“No,” Steve begged, “Bucky, no, it’s, I’m, I didn’t mean to—”

“I forgot,” Bucky said.

Steve tried to say _I don’t understand_ with only his eyes and desperation.

“You don’t need it. This. Me. You don’t need me to.”

“No,” Steve leapt in on top, “but I do, I do need you to,” and then they stood in the kitchen looking at each other for a minute amid coffee-splashed autumn-gilded sun.

“Maybe I knew you didn’t,” Bucky said. “Maybe I wanted to know if I could. If I still could. After.”

“After—”

“I took it,” Bucky told him, and Steve, not understanding, argued, “No, they took it, they took that from you—”

Bucky glanced down. No extraneous motion, only a weary shift of gaze that crumpled the breath in Steve’s lungs. He was looking at his hand: at the fingertips that’d so lately touched Steve’s skin and healed Steve’s skin and made Steve’s heart sing. “No. I. They told me who. To kill. And when. And when I did I took it away. Life.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, urgent and heartbroken and trying to both interrupt the horror and encourage it if Bucky needed to speak.

“How I’m standing,” Bucky said, “how I move around and _function_ , how I lift this arm without screaming, how this got stuck, goes on being stuck, to me. What I took. I needed.” Whirr, shiver, slide. Recalibration like tears, like the torn pages of a dictionary: shredded definitions.

“…technomancy,” Steve breathed. Steve did not say: the alchemy of magic and science, the mesh of metalwork infused with enchanted strength, the world you would’ve loved back when. And Steve Rogers did not know what to do, Steve who’d always wanted to fight for justice, always wanted to stand up to all bullies, always wanted Bucky Barnes. “Buck, I…” What words?

“They made me—” Bucky recalibrated sentences too. Opening deeper holes in Steve’s soul. “What I did. When I. I drained their—I lived on them. Like a—” He stopped. Steve couldn’t tell whether the word’d been another casualty lost to gaping black chasms, or whether Bucky simply didn’t feel like saying _vampire_.

“I’m not,” Bucky finished. “What you remember. What you need.”

Steve did remember.

A rough-and-tumble alley behind the school, that first-ever day of the rest of their lives. The crispness of fall in the air, the multifaceted scents and sounds of the city in afternoon. The heat of his own blood, pouring from his broken nose, coppery and bright with pain. And James Buchanan Barnes—confident, unselfconsciously beautiful in the way of a long-legged almost-teenager, charming and already tall, good at math and science and sports—had come over and said, “You idiot, what were you doing, that’s not how you win a fight,” and then had smiled at the other three boys, not politely.

“They were making fun of Ruthie Schultz,” Steve said, or tried to say. The blood was getting thick in his mouth.

“Yeah, and you stopped them,” James Buchanan Barnes said, “with your face? —Look, you three don’t actually want to pick on Stevie here, he’s kinda tiny, not really worth it—”

“Hey!”

“—but you can hit me if you want to, go on.”

The three lumps of muscle looked at each other, then at Bucky’s calm _I know something you don’t_ smile, and inched back.

“Don’t let them _go!”_

Bucky considered Steve and Steve’s pathetic protest, said to the bullies, “Get out of here,” and then muttered something that sounded an awful lot like, “Fuck me,” which were not words Steve Rogers expected James Barnes to ever even _know_ , and frowned in concentration and reached out to touch Steve’s throbbing nose with one purposeful athlete’s hand.

Steve flinched automatically, but the hurt did not come, only an odd gentle spreading heat like melting butter; for some reason he tasted cool pure spring water and crisp red apples and sweet black coffee, and he did not know then that those were flavors Bucky loved or would grow to love. He caught his breath, nose suddenly sore but unbroken.

“Sorry,” Bucky said. “I don’t practice much.”

“…witch,” Steve said, catching up. “ _Striga_. Healer, yeah? I didn’t know—”

“Nah. ’m not. Not so anyone knows.” Bucky, smiling in a self-embarrassed sort of way, took his hand off Steve’s face; he scrubbed the other hand through his hair in the alley sunshine, and Steve wanted the caress back on his own skin, wanted to draw James Barnes in sunlight from every angle; he wished he’d never seen or caused the painful flutter of awkwardness across that confidence, and he knew that Bucky was perfect, and he was helplessly angry at Bucky, only a little, for being so perfect: magical and tall and beautiful and stealing the breath right out of Steve’s lungs, because oh Steve knew then that his life would always be entwined with Bucky’s, even if Bucky never spoke to him again; he felt his heart crack open and learn love.

“I’m not,” Bucky said again, apparently thinking Steve needed clarification, still watching the ground somewhere near Steve’s left foot. “Not much good even if I was, okay?”

Steve couldn’t bear this, and said, “Yeah, it’s okay, I had ’em on the ropes, could’ve won just fine, you had to step in, jerk,” and meant _I love you._

“I know you did,” Bucky said, “why do you think I didn’t jump in sooner. Punk.” He had Steve’s blood on his fingertips, a smudge of drying red, and he’d gone back to smiling. “James Barnes. Bucky.”

“The hell kinda name is Bucky,” Steve said. His entire face ached and he was smiling too.

“My name,” Bucky said, “and wow, Rogers, you got a mouth on you.” His ears were very slightly pink: maybe blushing, maybe the cold. “Not bad, though? The nose. No helpin’ the rest of your face.”

“Great,” Steve decided. It was. Everything was. “You?” He knew about healers, at least a little. From his Ma.

“Fine,” Bucky deflected, which only made sense if he had spare energy and warmth lying around to give away, because Steve hadn’t seen him borrow any strength from anyplace else to pop into accelerated fixing of Steve’s face. He kicked a scrap of paper on the ground with near-convincing idleness. “Don’t. Y’know. Don’t say nothin’. My family doesn’t know.”

Steve opened his mouth, shut it.

Bucky’s family was not rich and not poor. They owned a car. Bucky’s sisters wore new dresses. Bucky’s trousers, if not expensive, were also new. And magic was, though hardly criminal, absolutely disreputable, like owning seventeen cats or turning up at fancy parties in a suit from thirty years ago. It was useful, and hence tolerated, but nobody who was anybody would admit to getting hands dirty in the art. Some people—for example, Howard Stark—flaunted technomancy and geomancy skills, but they were eccentric geniuses, from whom bizarre behavior could only be expected.

And Steve, who’d told his own Ma everything for as long as he could recall, thought about the Barnes family. About the way they obviously loved their son and cheered at his football games, and the way they beamed proudly when Bucky got first-of-the-class in scientific subjects: useful, educated, making something of himself.

And he thought about Bucky carrying this secret, and he imagined how long Bucky must’ve _been_ carrying it: imagined that with a kind of shocked awe and compassion and admiration and anger that such circumstances would conspire to exist, and anger that he, Steve Rogers, couldn’t punch said circumstances in the mouth.

He said, “I won’t,” meeting Bucky’s eyes.

“Thanks,” Bucky said. “Stevie.”

“See, now you’re doing that thing where you’re a jerk again,” Steve said, stupid and reckless, fizzy and filled up with it. “Steve. Not Stevie. Can I walk you home?” He did not even know if Bucky liked boys; he had only this afternoon learned about love; he needed to be with Bucky Barnes as long as possible, as long as forever.

Bucky’s ears got a little more pink, and he looked at Steve like _Steve_ was something amazing and newfound and wonderful, and he said, “Yeah. I—yeah, come on, sure.”

Later, much later, Bucky turned his own breath and blood into strength to keep his men safe, and Steve had not been there for the moment when Bucky stopped giving a damn about keeping the secret and instead used everything he had to protect those under his command; but he saw the change, and he saw the toll it took: how Bucky got thinner and more pale and more reckless with himself even as he rested a hand on Morita’s shoulder and soaked up burns left by a German flamethrower. Steve asked Dum Dum Dugan, once, quietly, while Bucky lay sleeping in Steve’s tent, no energy left for anything even close to making love. Dum Dum shuffled his moustache, shrugged, said, “Worse, yeah, since—but Sarge was like that before, whatever he had to do, kick us in the ass or kiss it better, he would,” and hesitated, but said nothing more. The specter of Bucky’s time in Nazi hands, in Hydra hands, hung between them, then.

Bucky hadn’t spoken about that either. Only poured his own reserves, more and more of them, into healing his men.

In the present, out of the silence, Steve said, “You’re wrong,” and put the force of all his love and ferocity and conviction behind it, because what was his strength for if not for this. Bucky blinked. He had Steve’s blood on his fingers again, but the cuts on Steve’s hand had healed. Steve thought that maybe other things might too, and watched Bucky’s face, holding his breath.

“Oh really,” Bucky said, “what’m I wrong about, Steve.”

“You said you wanted to know if you still could,” Steve said, “if you could still heal. You can. You _did_.”

“You didn’t need it.”

“I need you.”

“I’ll—drain you. Of. Everything.”

“You _wanted to know if you could heal,”_ Steve said, and saw Bucky get the emphasis. “Anyway I kinda have extra. Um. Reserves? Muscles? Strength? Dammit.”

Bucky’s eyes did a complicated expression like he wanted to laugh. “You always did. You always were. Extra.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, and held out a hand, two hands. The scattered bits of coffee-cup held their breath, down on the floor: a sacrifice maybe accepted, waiting to see. “So you won’t hurt me.”

“Even if I touch you.”

“I need you,” Steve said again. All the warrior strength in the world couldn’t save Bucky, because Bucky was saving him: Steve Rogers needed Bucky Barnes. For balance. For love and being loved. For healing. “Touch me.”

And Bucky started to speak, searched Steve’s face, paused, and—found a grin. “Smooth. That was—real smooth, Stevie. Gonna walk me home, next?”

“Jerk,” Steve said, not exactly crying. Hands out, both: an offering, a hope. “Yes. Can I walk you home?”

“We are home, punk,” Bucky said, and put his hands into Steve’s: one metal and chilly, one flesh-and-blood and also slightly chilly, both real and present and wry and willing to try. His hands warmed up as Steve closed his own around them; Steve’s hands got warmer too, thawing as Bucky’s fingers twined into his. Heat flared between them: the shyest tendrils of shared power, and the impression of a kiss. “But yeah, anyway. You always can.”


End file.
